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A great victory in Natal would save Natal, stop the Cape rising, and, if followed up, draw the Boer forces away from Kimberley and the Cape Colony. The other way was to follow the railway line or lines from the Cape ports, to collect the Army on the Orange River and advance to Bloemfontein, and thence towards Pretoria or towards the western exits from the passes through the Drakensberg mountains.
Buller's operations in the Free State lasted two days only. On June 10 he engaged a small body of the retreating enemy and entered the Transvaal. In front of him was the Versamelberg, a spur of the Drakensberg, over which the road from Vrede to Volksrust passes at Alleman's Nek, where 2,000 Boers with four guns had taken up a very strong position.
He said he was a "Hlubi" Kafir from Qumbu in the territory of Griqualand East, but that he had for some time past been living in Basutoland, which is situated just behind the frowning wall of the Drakensberg, to the south-west of where they were speaking, and not twenty miles distant. They talked until it was time for Langley to return to camp.
One Sunday it was just a week since the letter came Bessie was sitting after dinner on the verandah, when her quick ears caught what she took to be the booming of heavy guns far away on the Drakensberg. She rose, and leaving the house, climbed the hill behind it. On reaching its top she stood and looked at the great solemn stretch of mountains.
Soon other parties of emigrants came in from beyond the Drakensberg, and in 1838 an expedition under Potgieter failed to punish Dingaan for his treachery. Nor did an attempt to help the emigrants made by the British settlers at Durban meet with success. A small force of Natal natives under an Englishman named Biggar was greatly out-numbered at the mouth of the Tugela and perished almost to a man.
But to understand the country it is best to climb into the mountains of the long Drakensberg, which forms the Free State frontier in a series of strangely jagged and precipitous peaks, and at one place, by the junction with Basutoland, runs up to 11,000 feet. Last Sunday I went into the Free State through Van Reenen's Pass, over which a little railway has been carried by zigzag "reverses."
"I have heard of him and once I saw him, a few moons ago passing through Pinetown. A Kaffir with him told me that he was going over the Drakensberg to hunt for things that crawl and fly, being quite mad, Baas." "Well, where is he now, Hans? He should have been here to travel with us." "Am I a spirit that I can tell the Baas whither a white man has wandered. Yet, stay. Mavovo may be able to tell.
It will be seen on a map that North Natal forms a fairly regular isoceles triangle, having Charlestown, Majuba, and Laing's Nek at the apex, the Drakensberg range separating it from the Free State on the one side, and the Buffalo River with its lower hills separating it from the Transvaal on the other.
It illustrates his own fairness and detachment of mind that he should have taken so strong and so unpopular a line when the Boers were generally supposed in England to have acquiesced in the loss of their liberties, and when his hero Sir Garnet Wolseley, to whom he dedicated his English in Ireland, had declared that the Vaal would run back to the Drakensberg before the British flag ceased to wave over Pretoria.
The months when such surprise weather is most liable to occur are from "July to October," before and during the earlier spring rains. It is then, and even up to December at times, that the Drakensberg and other mountains resume their snow-capped winter decorations for some days.
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